I'm looking into hopefully getting a new laptop soon, and I want it to be able to play new games such as Battlefield 2142 or Supreme Commander well. I've seen these new computers with the "dual-core" processor things, and I'm wondering, if it's, say, a 1.8 GHz dual-core processor, does that essentially make it like a "single-core" 3.6 GHz processor? That's the impression I get from it. Or is it a similar situation, but not quite? I don't know what to think. Hope somebody can shed some light on this issue for me!

Intel and AMD may want you to think so, but processors don't scale exactly. Not only will two cores used to the max be a little bit slower (generally) than a single processor with twice the specs, but game programmers have to write the games a little differently to use both cores effectively.

That being said, dual-core processors are still quite nice.

Sun Tzu said: "Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand."

If you are going with a laptop, the odds of you being able to play games like the ones you mentioned aren't very good. Reason being that most laptops have built in video processors and most high-end games don't support these processors. My best recommendation is to check out the forums for said games and see if anyone has reported any issues or successes with playing on laptops and what sort of video processor the laptop had.

Newer games that aren't as graphics intensive should play fine, but I imagine you'd have trouble with Supreme Commander or CoD4 or something. Supreme Commander might run but it can be a memory hog with so much going on at once so another thing to look at is plenty of RAM, and a lot of memory for the video card processor as well.